COVERING A WIDE VARIETY OF FICTION AND NON-FICTION SUBJECTS, THESE SHORT STORIES BY BARRY DEVONALD CAN BE READ ON-LINE OR CUT AND PASTED FOR PRINTING. BARRY LIVES AND WRITES IN VANCOUVER, BC CANADA. HE WELCOMES FEEDBACK OF ANY STRIPE.

Can You Smell Burning?

Feeling very relaxed well into a long and up to that point uneventful transpacific flight some time ago en-route to Sydney Australia, I thought I could smell burning. In an instant needless to say I was no longer relaxed. I tried to tell myself it was probably something else I was smelling or perhaps just imagining, surely nothing was burning in the fully seated cabin of the late model Boeing about half way into the largely over water flight.  As I was trying to process this, musing with the idea that it was quite likely just my sometimes overblown imagination playing tricks on me, the passenger seated next to me turned and said, can you smell burning?

Many years ago to say the least, that is when I was a kid of about twelve, one dark winter’s night in my home town of Barrow-in-Furness, a rather off the beaten track industrial town in north west England,* a small group of my friends and I were kicking a soccer ball around aided by the dim light from a street lamp would you believe, a gas lamp? In the early 1950s at least in our town, the council had yet to upgrade street lighting from gas, produced by the gasification of coal to electricity, the latter also being derived from coal but by burning it to drive a steam fed electrical generator. That’s a lot of coal literally going up in acrid smoke. At least the electric street lamps when they finally showed were much brighter than the gas ones. 

While engaged in our harmless if cold, quasi athletic pursuit I heard looked up and then spotted, an aircraft flying surprisingly low and apparently on fire! I told my friends and sure enough we all agreed, the relatively small twin prop airliner was in dire trouble. It was lit up by flames engulfing its starboard i.e. the right hand side engine.

By pure chance, I happened to have a small pair of binoculars in my pocket just recently given to me by a favourite uncle. I trained them on the plane which was perhaps at about one thousand feet above both the ground and hence sea level, Barrow being on the coast. Now I had a close up view of copious amounts of billowing flames coming out of the starboard engine. It turned out we discovered the following day, that the aircraft was what in the UK was called a Douglas Dakota – or in the US and Canada, a Douglas DC-3 in its era, a very well regarded and reliable passenger aircraft.

Our medium sized town did not have a public airport. It did have a private one used by the big-wigs in charge of our local shipyard, ship building being by far the major industry and thus employer in the town as to my knowledge, indeed it still is to this day mostly by building Britain’s nuclear powered submarines. However although there was a control tower, not only was the private airport generally unmanned even in daylight, it did not have any runway lights. Although close, it was of no use to the pilots fighting fire above us.

Clearly in major distress the aircraft turned away from Barrow and out over the Irish sea gradually disappearing from view. We could not tell if it was loosing altitude or not. All we could do was to hope it would make it on one engine to goodness knows where.

The next morning I grabbed the daily newspaper as soon as it was delivered. Sure enough the incident was written up. The aircraft had headed out over water crossing Morecambe Bay towards the town of Blackpool – the latter with its own famous tower somewhat resembling France’s Eiffel tower.** Built between 1891 and 1894 the tower still stands to this day and it’s highly regarded circus performances, rightly these days without animals, continue to be performed within it. 

My friends and I had figured it would be about a twenty to thirty minute flight from where we had last seen the plane until it was close to Blackpool airport. I happened to know that it had a lighted runway – the only one at the time of the incident within miles. Likely I knew this because my favourite uncle who had given me the binoculars had learned to fly there. In doing so he had triggered a burning interest in the twelve year old me to one day learn to fly. This I eventually did flying Canadian designed and built Fleet 80 Canucks and gaining a ‘single engine land’ license many, many years later, soon after emigrating to Canada when I was twenty five. ***

Having whilst still in flight managed somehow to smother and finally extinguish the engine fire, in part no doubt by the simple expedient of shutting off the fuel to it, the aircraft had indeed touched down in Blackpool. No lives were lost nor were there any injuries. These memories quickly resurfaced when I was asked by a fellow passenger on the Boeing, can you smell burning? As already noted, we were over the mid North Pacific ocean and as was the case with the Blackpool issue, it was night time. 

I was almost reluctant to sniff the Boeing’s cabin air however I figured I better had. My nose quickly came back with the result. Not the one I was hoping for. Yes I could smell burning I advised my fellow and like me, by then very concerned passenger. We were of course hundreds if not thousands of miles from an airport and over water. Had the pilots already put out a Mayday call I wondered? If we had to ditch, the chances of rescue would be almost zero in mid-Pacific ocean and at night. If we were very lucky best case perhaps a ship might be nearby. We would for sure crash-land heavily into the water. The odds were very much against us.

The cabin intercom beeped. Here we go for sure most everyone on the flight would have thought as pulses were about to raise big time. It beeped again and a female flight attendant’s voice said “if anyone can smell burning, don’t worry about it?”. Oh sure I imagine most everyone thought, how can one not? She continued verbatim “we have burned the toast in the galley and the smoke from it has got into the air conditioning system”.

Phew! With baited collective breaths I’m sure every passenger aboard exhaled about as vigorously as it is possible to do. Certainly I did. Burned toast anyone? Or ‘burnt’ if you happen to be British. 

* Barrow is home to the ruins of Furness Abbey. Dating back to 1123, a former Catholic monastery it was once the second-wealthiest and the most powerful Cistercian monastery in the country. This prior to its dissolution during the English Reformation.

** The towers look remarkably similar however the Eiffel is a tower from the ground up which opened in 1889. Opening in 1894, Blackpool’s tower is built on top of a large building housing, among other things, its world famous circus. Since 1990 and rightly, with no performing animals. That said I do remember my delight in watching as a very young child, eleven a side as per the regular rules, small dogs playing soccer. Both sides ‘scored’ numerous goals into the empty nets at each end there being no canine goalkeepers.    

*** see my story Aircraft Down. 

NB: i.e. Nota Bene: Not Written by ChatGPT but by Barry H. Devonald.

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